American Science Fiction Five Classic Novels 1956-58 (71 page)

In the coffee shop, in the barber’s chair, and even in the tub, he pored again and again over the account of Egtverchi’s broadcast. The Italian reporter did not give a text, for obvious reasons—a thirteen-minute broadcast would have filled an entire page of the journal in which he was limited to a single column of type—but he digested it skillfully, and he had an inside story to go with it. Ruiz was impressed.

Evidently Egtverchi had composed his rebuttal by weaving together the news items of the evening, just as they had come in to him off the wires beyond any possibility of his selecting them, into a brilliant extempore attack upon Earthly moral assumptions and pretensions. The thread which wove them all together was summed up by the magazine’s reporter in a phrase from the Inferno:
Perche mi scerpi?/non hai tu spirto di pietate alcuno?
—the cry of the Suicides, who can speak only when the Harpies rend them and the blood flows: “Wherefore pluckest
thou
me?” It had been a scathing indictment, at no point defending Egtverchi’s own conduct, but by implication making ridiculous the notion that any man could be stainless enough to be casting stones. Egtverchi had obviously absorbed Schopenhauer’s vicious
Rules for Debate
down to the last comma.

“And in fact,” the Italian reporter added, “it is widely known in Manhattan that QBC officials were on the verge of cutting off the outworlder in mid-broadcast as he began to cover the Stockholm brothel war. They were dissuaded by the barrage of telephone calls, telegrams and radiograms which began to pour down upon QBC’s main office at precisely that moment. The response of the public has hardly diminished since, and it continues to be overwhelmingly approving. The network, encouraged by Signor Egtverchi’s major sponsor, Bridget Bifalco World Kitchens, now is issuing almost hourly releases containing statistics ‘proving’ the broadcast a spectacular success. Signor Egtverchi is now a hot property, and if past experience is any guide (and it is) this means that henceforth the Lithian will be encouraged to display those aspects of his public character for which formerly he was being widely condemned, for which the network was considering taking him off the air in the middle of a word. Suddenly, in short, he is worth a lot of money.”

The report was both literate and overheated—a peculiarly Roman combination—but as long as Ruiz lacked the text of the broadcast itself, he could not take exception to a word of it. Both the reporter’s editorializing and the precise passion of his language seemed no more than justified. Indeed, a case could be made for a claim that the man had indulged in understatement.

To Ruiz, at least, Egtverchi’s voice came through. The accent was familiar and perfect. And this for an audience full of children! Had any independent person called Egtverchi ever really existed? If so, he was possessed—but Ruiz did not believe that for an instant. There had never been any real Egtverchi to possess. He was throughout a creature of the Adversary’s imagination, as even Chtexa had been, as the whole of Lithia had been. In the figure of Egtverchi He had already abandoned subtlety; already He dared to show Himself more than halfnaked, commanding money, fathering lies, poisoning discourse, compounding grief, corrupting children, killing love, building armies—

—and all in a Holy Year.

Ruiz-Sanchez froze, one arm halfway into his summer jacket, looking up at the ceiling of the dressing room. He had yet to make more than two telephone calls, neither of them to the general of his Order, but he had already changed his mind.

Had he really failed, all this time, to read such obvious signs —or was he as crazed as heretics are supposed to be, smelling the
Dies irae
, the day of the wrath of God, in the steam of nothing but a public bath? Armageddon—in 3-V? The pit opened to let loose a comedian for the amusement of children?

He did not know. He could only be sure that he needed to hunt for no bed tonight, after all; what he needed was stones. He got out of the Casa del Passegero as quickly as he could, leaving everything he owned behind, and found his way alone back to the Via del Termini; the guidebook showed a church just off there, on the Piazza della Republica, by the Baths of Diocletian.

The book was right. The church was there: Santa Maria d’Angeli. He did not stop in the porch to cool off, though the early evening sunlight was almost as hot as noon. Tomorrow might be much hotter—unredeemably hotter. He went through the portals at once.

Inside, in the chill darkness, he knelt; and in cold terror, he prayed.

It did not seem to do him much good.

All about Michelis the jungle stood frozen in a riot of motionlessness. Filtered through it, the sourceless blue-gray daylight was tinged with deep green, and where the light fell on one or another clear reflection it seemed to penetrate rather than glance off, carrying the jungle on in an inversion of images to the eight corners of the universe. The illusion was made doubly real by the stillness of everything; at any moment it seemed as though a breeze would spring up and ruffle the reflections, but there was no breeze, and nothing but time would ever disturb those images.

Egtverchi moved, of course; though his figure was ensmalled as if by distance, he was about the right size for the rest of the jungle, and almost more convincingly colored and in the round. His circumscribed gestures seemed to be beckoning, as though he were attempting to lead Michelis out of this motionless wilderness.

Only his voice was jarring: it was at normal conversational volume, which meant that it was far too loud to be in scale with himself or his (and Michelis’) surroundings. It seemed so loud to Michelis, indeed, that in his reverie he almost missed the content of Egtverchi’s final speech. Only when Egtverchi had bowed ironically and faded away and his voice died, leaving behind only the omni-present muted insect buzz, did the meaning penetrate.

Michelis sat where he was, stunned. A full thirty seconds of commercial for Mammale Bifalco’s Delicious Instant Knish Mix went by before he remembered to put his finger over the 3-V’s cut-off stud. Then this year’s Bridget Bifalco in turn faded in mid-mix, smothered before she reached her famous brogue tag-line (“Give it t’ me a minute, dharlin’, till I give it a lhashin’ ”). The scurrying electrons in the phosphor complex migrated back to the atoms from which they had been driven by the miniature de Broglie scanner imbedded in the picture frame. The atoms resumed their chemical identity, the molecules cooled, and the screen became a static reproduction of Paul Klee’s “Caprice in February.” The principle, Michelis recalled with gray irrelevancy, had emerged out of d’Averoigne’s first “Petard” paper, the count’s only venture into applied math, published when he was seventeen.

“What does he mean?” Liu said faintly. “I don’t understand him at all any more. He calls it a demonstration—but what can he possibly demonstrate by that? It’s childish!”

“Yes,” Michelis said. For the moment he could think of nothing else to say. He needed to get his temper back; he was losing it more and more easily these days. That had been one of the reasons for his urgency in marrying Liu: he needed her calmness, for his own was vanishing with frightening rapidity.

No calmness seemed to be passing from her to him now. Even the apartment, originally such a source of satisfaction and repose for them both, felt like a trap. It was far above ground, in one of the mostly unused project buildings on the upper East Side of Manhattan. Originally Liu had had a far smaller set of rooms in the same building, and Michelis, after he had got used to the idea, had had them both installed in the present apartment with only a minimum of wire-pulling. It was not customary, it was certainly not fashionable, and they were officially warned that it was considered dangerous—the gangs raided surface structures now and then; but apparently it was no longer outright illegal, if one had the money to live that high up in the slums.

Given the additional space, the artist buried inside Liu’s demure technician’s exterior had run quietly wild. In the green glow of concealed light which washed the apartment, Michelis was surrounded by what seemed to be a miniature jungle. On small tables stood Japanese gardens with real Ming trees or dwarf cedars in them. An oriental lamp was fashioned out of a piece of fantastically sculptured driftwood. Long, deep, woven flower boxes ran completely around the room at eye level; they were thickly planted with ivy, wandering Jew, rubber plants, philodendron, and other nonflowering species, and behind each box a mirror ran up to the ceiling, unbroken anywhere except by the placidly witty Klee reproduction which was the 3-V set; the painting, made almost wholly of detached angles and glyphs like the symbols of mathematics, was a welcome oasis of dryness for which Liu had paid a premium—QBC’s stock “covers” were mostly Sargents and van Goghs. Since the light tubes were hidden behind the planting boxes, the room gave an effect of extraterrestrial exuberance kept under control only with the greatest difficulty.

“I know what he means,” Michelis said at last. “I just don’t know quite how to put it. Let me think a minute—why don’t you get dinner while I do it? We’d better eat early. We’re going to have visitors, that’s a cinch.”

“Visitors? But— All right, Mike.”

Michelis walked to the glass wall and looked out onto the sun porch. All of Liu’s flowering plants were out there, a real garden, which had to be kept sealed off from the rest of the apartment; for in addition to being an ardent amateur gardener, Liu bred bees. There was a colony of them there, making singular and exotic honeys from the congeries of blossoms Liu had laid out so carefully. The honey was fabulous and everchanging, sometimes too bitter to eat except in tiny forktouches like Chinese mustard, sometimes containing a heady touch of opium from the sticky hybrid poppies that nodded in a soldierly squad along the sun porch railing, sometimes sicklysweet and insipid until, with a surprisingly small amount of glassware, Liu converted it into a liqueur that mounted to the head like a breeze from the Garden of Allah. The bees that made it were tetraploid monsters the size of hummingbirds, with tempers as bad as Michelis’ own was getting to be; only a few of them could kill even a big man. Luckily, they flew badly in the gusts common at this altitude, and would starve anywhere but in Liu’s garden, otherwise Liu would never have been licensed to keep them on an open sun porch in the middle of the city. Michelis had been more than a little wary of them at first, but lately they had begun to fascinate him: their apparent intelligence was almost as phenomenal as their size and viciousness.

“Damn!” Liu said behind him.

“What’s the matter?”

“Omelettes again. That’s the second wrong number I’ve dialed this week.”

Both the oath—mild though it was—and the error were uncharacteristic. Mike felt a twinge, a mixture of compassion and guilt. Liu was changing; she had never been so distractible before. Was he responsible?

“It’s all right. I don’t mind. Let’s eat.”

“All right.”

They ate silently, but Michelis was conscious of the pressure of inquiry behind Liu’s still expression. The chemist thought furiously, angry with himself, and yet unable to phrase what he wanted to say. He should never have got her into this at all. No, that couldn’t have been prevented; she had been the logical scientist to handle Egtverchi in his infancy—probably nobody else could have brought him through it even this well. But surely it should have been possible to keep her from becoming emotionally involved—

No, that had not been possible either; that was the woman of it. And the man of it, now that he was forced to think about his own role. It was no use; he simply did not know what he should think; Egtverchi’s broadcast had rattled him beyond the point of logical thought. He was going to wind up with his usual bad compromise with Liu, which was to say nothing at all. But that would not do either.

And yet it had been a simple enough piece of foolery that the Lithian had perpetrated—childish, as Liu had said. Egtverchi had been urged to be off beat, rebellious, irresponsible, and he had come through in spades. Not only had he voiced his disrespect for all established institutions and customs, but he had also challenged his audience to show the same disrespect. In the closing moments of his broadcast, he had even told them how: they were to mail anonymous, insulting messages to Egtverchi’s own sponsors.

“A postcard will do,” he had said, gently enough, through his grinning chops. “Just make the message pungent. If you hate that powdered concrete they call a knish mix, write and tell them so. If you can eat the knishes but our commercials make you sick, write them about that, and don’t pull any punches. If you loathe
me
, tell the Bifalcos that, too, and make sure you’re spitting mad about it. I’ll read the five messages I think in the worst possible taste on my broadcast next week. And remember, don’t sign your name; if you have to sign, use my name. Goodnight.” The omelette tasted like flannel.

“I’ll tell you what I think,” Michelis said suddenly, in a low voice. “I think he’s whipping up a mob. Remember those kids in the uniforms? He’s abandoned that now, or else he’s keeping it under cover; in any event, he thinks he has something better. He has an audience of about sixty-five million, and maybe half of them are adults. Of those, another half is unsane to some degree, and that’s what he’s counting on now. He’s going to turn that group into a lynch gang.”

“But why, Mike?” Liu said. “What good will that do him?” “I don’t know. That’s what stops me. He’s not after power— he’s got too many brains to think he can be a mccarthy. Maybe he just wants to destroy things. An elaborate act of revenge.”

“Revenge!”

“I’m only guessing. I don’t understand him any better than you do. Maybe worse.”

“Revenge on whom?” Liu said steadily. “And for what?”

“Well—on us. For making such a bad job of him.”

“I see,” Liu said. “I see.” She looked down into her untouched plate and began to weep, silently. At that moment, Michelis would gladly have killed either Egtverchi or himself, had he known where to begin.